Editing Muhammad ibn Idris al-Shafi’i (section)

==Islamic Studies Scholars==
Among modern writers, Schacht stresses an argument Shafi’i made expressly in two of the short works: that local custom, hadith from experts of the previous centuries, and common sense are always outweighed by hadith from the Prophet. (The ''Risala'' assumes without discussion that only hadith from the Prophet have weight.) Calder (1983) finds that the ''Risala'' legitimizes disagreement among jurisprudents by distinguishing between simple questions whose answers all Muslims know and abstruse questions only experts can address and whose answers even they can know only probably, not certainly. Adherents of all schools from the tenth century onwards legitimized disagreement in roughly the same way, although it is hard to say to what extent Shafi‘i’s arguments were what caused the theory to spread. Hallaq argues that just because it sought a middle course between traditionalism and rationalism, well in advance of majority opinion, the ''Risala'' attracted little attention until the tenth century.

The ''Umm'' as we know it manifestly includes some interpolations by later authors. Calder (1993) proposes that the ''Risala'' and the ''Umm'' (and implicitly the other extant works of Shafi’i as well) are primarily the work of later disciples writing in Shafi’i’s name. Among other things, Calder argues that these works appeal to prophetic hadith (as opposed to the opinions of earlier jurisprudents) in the fashion of other works from the early tenth century, not from the early ninth. Calder’s opinion has not commanded wide assent, but the question of attribution remains open. A Shafi’i school of law was constituted when, first, Shafi’i’s doctrine had been collected and organized and, second, a regular procedure had been developed for training and certifying new Shafi’i jurisprudents. The two came together with Ibn Surayj (863–918) in Baghdad. He trained his advanced students with the ''Mukhtasar'' (Epitome) of al-Muzani, Shafi’i’s most important Egyptian disciple. The other surviving schools of law formed similarly over the course of the tenth century. 

The Shafi’i school is distinguished by the acuity of its juridical reasoning, so that writing about the theory of Islamic law was long dominated by Shafi’i jurists, although doubtless their preponderance will appear to diminish as more and more non-Shafi’i works are studied. Outside North Africa, the Shafi’i and [[Hanafi]] schools for centuries almost divided the Islamic world between them. At the end of the Middle Ages, however, the Hanafi school was favored by Turkish rulers from the Ottoman Empire to the Mogul, so the Shafi’i school is now predominant only on the edges of the Islamic world, as in Indonesia, Yemen, and East Africa.